NO EFFIGY TO SEE HERE
06/12/24 13:31
We can live as a religious effigy by living from religion. We can grow in our humanity as an expression of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not leave us a religion to live. He left us Himself. Thus John Powell wrote that in oneness with Christ we become ‘fully human and fully alive’. But if Christ is not our life and all we have is a religious routine – we are not alive in spirit and soul.
MORE THAN BOX TICKING
The mystery of Real Life/Godliness is seen and experienced in Jesus Christ. We may recognise the Spirit of Christ in ourselves when we desire to be like Him; when we seek to be more gracious, truthful and loving as a person. It is also a holy desire to seek to be more the person you are and not a clone of someone else. ‘Being you’ in spirit and in truth is honouring to God and the validating of yourself in identity and holiness in Christ. To be you rather than a smudged self, a partial self or a clone of someone else is neither holy or glorious. Jesus gives you authenticity as you and agency as a Kingdom multiplier.
‘The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law’ Mark 1.22 NIV. We have the authority as an authentic self when Christ is our life.
THE MYSTERY
The mystery of this kind of Godliness is that we become ourselves by being hidden in Christ. In Christ we are ‘revealed’ as us, so to speak.
Jesus healed when among us by His creative power as the Son of God. Jesus Christ as son of man and son of God is uniquely suited to be our re-creator since He is our Creator. Thomas Torrance explains, “Since in Jesus Christ there became flesh the very Word of God through whom all human beings are created and without whom no single human being has ever existed, the coming of that Word in Jesus Christ must be regarded as a continuation of God's creation and as the bringing of his creative activity to bear intensively upon what God has already made, thereby reinforcing its creaturely status, and, in our case, its human status.” (1) Day by day, Jesus is creating the Real You.
REPLICATED
It is by the regeneration of persons in this mode that we become the Body of Christ in spirit and in truth. Each person takes on the nature of their real selves in Christ by creation and redemption. New Creation Life is more than moralities. It’s life itself and in particular you becoming who you are and Believers becoming who they are as kings and priests by incarnation and its transformation. Real life is not religion. It is the life of God as you and as us.
ADOPTED TO THE LIKENES OF GOD
To retain ourselves in religion is to live a muted self. To be born again is to move from externalities to incarnation, meaning we agree with Christ that He is our life and we rest in His person, His Holy Family and in His shaping of our lives as a manifestation of Himself in a way that is truly us. As such we are the Body of Christ, the new creation and the Kingdom of God.
(1) The Mediation of Christ, p.69.